The Power of Relics: The Curation of Human Bone in British Bronze Age Burials

Abstract

In this article, the authors examine radiocarbon, histo-taphonomic, and contextual evidence for the deliberate curation, manipulation, and redeposition of human bone in British Bronze Age mortuary contexts. New radiocarbon dates and histological analyses are combined with existing data to explore the processes and practices that resulted in the incorporation of ‘relic’ fragments of bone in later graves, including evidence for the deliberate re-opening of previous burials and for funerary treatments such as excarnation and mummification. In some cases, fragments of human bone were curated outside the mortuary context. The authors consider what the treatment of human remains reveals about mortuary complexity in the Bronze Age, about relations between the living and the dead, and about attitudes to the body and concepts of the self.

Gender in Earlier Bronze Age Ireland and Scotland

“…If that were also the case here, these patterns might demonstrate an ongoing connection with specific embodied identities of the deceased rather than an understanding of human bone as remnants of generic ancestors. Crucially, this is in line with Brück and Booth's (2022) argument that bones were usually curated for one to three generations, when stories of the deceased might still be remembered.…”

“…Here, the community seems to have been concerned with difference, creating it through the burial rite, though whether that adhered to sex, age, or some other category is unclear. In Britain, human bone was often curated for several generations prior to deposition with articulated burials (Brück & Booth, 2022). If that were also the case here, these patterns might demonstrate an ongoing connection with specific embodied identities of the deceased rather than an understanding of human bone as remnants of generic ancestors.…”

“…Here, the community seems to have been concerned with difference, creating it through the burial rite, though whether that adhered to sex, age, or some other category is unclear. In Britain, human bone was often curated for several generations prior to deposition with articulated burials (Brück & Booth, 2022).…”

The Ambivalent Dead: Curation, Excarnation and Complex Post-mortem Trajectories in Middle and Late Bronze Age Britain

“…Before proceeding with more in-depth analysis of individual sites, some general observations can be made for the dataset as a whole. Of the 22 Middle and Late Bronze Age non-mortuary deposits for which we generated dates for this project, four could be assigned to the Middle Bronze Age and the other 18 to the Late Bronze Age or Earliest Iron Age (Table 1); this is in line with other evidence for the increasing occurrence of human bone from nonmortuary contexts in the Late Bronze Age (Brück 2019). Combination of dates on samples from five out of 22 deposits (23%) produced poor agreement indices and failed the X 2 test, indicating that the human remains from these contexts were anomalously old; all these bones had been curated for a significant period of time.…”

“…In the Middle and Late Bronze Age, despite the often short timeframe between death and deposition, it is not clear how (or whether) personal identity was vested in fragmented skeletal elements, although the prevalence of skull fragments should be noted, for the head may have been viewed as an important locus of personhood. The fragmentation of the body was a normal part of the human lifecycle, facilitating fluid and relational concepts of the self that do not neatly fit with normative models of the Bronze Age person as a defined, enduring locus of power (Brück 2019). The spatial dislocation between the place of burial and the final place of deposition indicates that human remains could move across space as well as time, giving material form to inter-personal links.…”